Neither Marc Lasry nor Wesley Edens will be the president of the Bucks

Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry get ready to meet and greet local fans (Photo credit: Bucks.com)

As part of their public relations blitz on Milwaukee last Friday, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens joined the Homer & Gabe show on ESPN Milwaukee 540 AM. It was the most revealing interview of the day for the new owners, as they were pressed with a number of interesting questions and occasionally re-asked a question or two when the answer drifted off the original topic.

One interesting detail that came to light in the interview is that neither Lasry nor Edens has any designs on being the Bucks team president, a role held by Herb Kohl and Jim Fitzgerald during their respective ownerships,

The past two owners of the Bucks have served as team president. How involved are you guys going to be in the day-to-day operations? Is one of you going to serve as president? What’s kind of the thought process there?

Wesley Edens: We’re not going to be the president. We both live in New York City and so we’re going to be out here a lot, and we’re going to have a lot of involvement in the community, but we’re not going to be the president. What has been successful for us in our businesses has been to hire great people. We spent the day with the business organization, and while we’re not as experienced on the basketball side as we certainly will be in the future, on the business side we’re very experienced. I think there’s a tremendous amount of upside and I’m 100% confident that we can put together an A+ business organization and get the right people to do it.

So the Bucks will have a president who isn’t the owner for the first time in nearly 40 years. The business side of things probably isn’t the duo’s top priority at the moment. Edens and Lasry have a lot of issues to sort out, especially with the draft coming up in less than four weeks and the team needing to make a decision on their most important personnel asset.

Edens and Lasry went on to emphasize a number of other points, most notably that the decision on draft day will ultimately be theirs and not John Hammond‘s.

Marc Lasry: We’ll either decide by agreeing with John and the team, or we’ll say ‘no’, here’s what we believe. But at the end of the day, I think we are going to end up relying on a lot of the information that John and the rest of the team has because they’re going to have far more information than we do.

Hammond is still the general manager, but the new ownership group definitely is taking a hands-on approach when it comes to the basketball decisions for their new team.

Husband. Father. Blogger. Retired mathlete. I covered Larry Sanders' "Three Thumbs Up" game as credentialed media -- and failed to see well enough to witness the thumbing as it happened. On Twitter, I'm anaheimamigos.